Honestly, i don’t think words are going to do it. They have to understand it in another way. Which is maybe part of why I think it will stay subtextual. I think there will be some resolution and we will feel good about it, but it will be a subtextual resolution.
I hope that tarmac was the last time Sherlock and John have to try to say goodbye to each other. They’re not good at it. They shouldn’t have to do it ever again.
THIS.
Their lack of talking about it on the tarmac felt so honest to me. After all, what are they going to say? What words could possibly contain the truth? There’s nothing. There are no words that can communicate how they feel, what we’ve seen they feel, what they’ve seen they feel.
There are other ways to communicate it. We’ve seen those too. John breaking down at a grave. Sherlock diving into a fire with tears of pure fear in his eyes. An entire episode of wedding speech in which the perfect communications were a drunken starry-eyed look and a vow (in which the word ‘love’ was never spoken) to always be there.
Touches, kisses, hugs, tears. Nothing these two men had access to in the moment they were standing there facing each other. Nothing they could allow themselves to indulge in when they weren’t in complete privacy (they had the curtains drawn when they practiced dancing).
If they’d touched, they would never have let go again. You know that’s true, and so do they. That’s why they kept their hands behind their backs except for that single, formal handshake.
